Voting as a Civic Duty, Climate and Economic Resilience Amid COVID-19, and More

July 21, 2020

A majority of Americans feel that voting is both a right and a duty—what if the voting system reflected this belief? A new report by the Brookings Governance Studies program and the Harvard Ash Center explores what universal civic duty voting in the United States would look like and proposes concrete steps to make it happen.

“COVID-19 is only adding more salt to a wound that has festered for decades: inaccessible, unaffordable, and fragile infrastructure that has failed to support a clean, safe environment for millions of households. And unfortunately, it usually takes a disaster to raise our collective consciousness of this challenge,” writes Joseph Kane.

Under the premise of protecting U.S. jobs and spurring economic recovery, the Trump administration announced last month that they would place expansive new bans on worker visas and extend restrictions on new green cards. Britta Glennon says that these efforts to block legal immigration will send jobs, innovation, and investment to other nations.

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